By Núria Calzada

Leonard W. Pickard (Atlanta, 1945) is an emblematic and visionary figure in the history of psychedelics. He is the largest producer of LSD in history, according to the DEA, and has many adventures to tell. From his regained freedom he reflects on his intense life, the human condition, writing and the changes that have taken place in the world of drugs.

‍

Leonard W. Pickard, the largest producer of LSD in history, according to the DEA, showed an exceptional talent for science from a young age. An attraction to the counterculture of the 1960s led him to leave Princeton University and move to San Francisco, where he befriended Tim Scully and Nick Sand, pioneers in the large-scale distribution of LSD.

After years in hiding and a few arrests and convictions, he entered Harvard's Kennedy School, where he predicted the fentanyl crisis in his 1996 doctoral thesis long before it became an epidemic. He was Aarrested in 2000 and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in a maximum security prison, he managed to handwrite The Rose of Paracelsus, an autobiographical novel exploring the life and ideals of a group of underground LSD chemists.

In 2020 he was miraculously paroled and, at seventy-eight, feels that life has given him a second chance. Faced with the serene, leisurely and reflective man he is today, it is hard to imagine the avid spiritual explorer and clandestine chemist he once was. In this interview, this hero of the psychedelic counterculture looks back on his many lives.

‍

Tell us about your origins.

I was born in 1945, right at the end of World War II, in Atlanta, Georgia. Rural Georgia is full of Scottish and Irish descendants, many of whom joined the military. So we saw many return from the European drama, and there were just as many who did not return. I remember, in my church, when I was a child, there were many fatherless children. It was a poignant thing, although I didn't realize the gravity of it until I was older. Regardless, I grew up relatively happy as a southern boy: pine forests, lots of hiking, a southern lifestyle. My family was primarily academic. My father was a lawyer and my mother was head of Mycology at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. My mother was a colleague of Roger Heim, a French botanist specializing in mycology, who gave the first name to the genus and species of Psilocybe mushrooms when they were discovered in Mexico by Gordon Wasson. Wasson gave them to Albert Hoffman, who first identified and synthesized their active component, psilocybin. But it was Heim who named the mushrooms Psilocybe mexicana, P. cubensis, P. aztecorum and many other species. So our house was often full of scientists visiting us from all over the world: Spain, South America, China.... In high school I was something like the local wizard. I participated in many science competitions and actually won the national ones.

‍

‍

How did your interest in psychedelics begin?

At 17 I had no idea about cannabis and only a faint concept of LSD. My first synthesis of LSD was at 21, in Cambridge. But before that I went to study neuroscience at Princeton and almost immediately gave it up for the pleasures of the 1960s. One way or another we all ended up in San Francisco at a very young age, those were the days of the first large-scale LSD distributions. And the people responsible for it were Tim Scully and Nick Sand, the main chemists of The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Well, Owsley preceded them with a production of five million doses and Tim and Nikki surpassed him later with a production of twenty to thirty million doses. The latter, after being arrested by the DEA and convicted, made bail and fled. During the twenty years he was on the run, he produced an additional 13.5 kg of LSD, that is, two hundred and sixty million doses. Nikki was finally arrested in Canada in '96 and brought to the United States to face the previous charge that had been brought against him in the early seventies, when he was sentenced to only fifteen years. In those days, moreover, they used to serve a third of the sentence. So he returned to the United States, where he served six years, and then spent the rest of his life with Usha, his lovely new wife. Nikki passed away in 2017 during the MAPS conference in Oakland. One day he participated in the conference, receiving great recognition and hugs from the audience, and the next day he had a heart attack. Very moving tributes were held in San Francisco in his memory. Even from prison I managed to send a fragment of a poem to be read in his honor. I had a special esteem for Nicky; during my youth, he was something of a hero to me. I remember attending Tim and Nikki's trial after Brotherhood in 1976, at the Federal Building in San Francisco. Back then I had curly afro-style hair and showed up wearing a blue velvet jacket, a moons and stars necklace and that sort of thing. The federal agents didn't know who I was, thus attending the trial, or what to make of me. I handed out roses to members of the defense, and Judy, Nikki's then-wife, handed out buttons that said, “We're in this together.” Today they would be real collector's items.

‍

Predicting the fentanyl crisis

‍

After several years as an underground chemist and a few arrests, you joined the Kennedy School of Government under the tutelage of Mark Klein, where you predicted the future crisis surrounding fentanyl. Tell us this story.

Mark Kleiman was the top drug policy guy in the United States. He was a former head of policy at the Department of Justice. When I met him he was an associate professor of Criminal Justice at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. We met at a MAPS conference and I told him that I would love to go to the Kennedy School, although I was aware that, because of my past, it would be unlikely. However, he encouraged me to apply and I did. And miraculously I was admitted. Mark was looking for someone who could articulate life in the underground world and the nature of drugs and, in particular, someone who could provide insight into the situation of the future: what drugs would be on the street in the next few years, what would be the next drug of abuse? At that time, 92-93, we only had the legacy substances on the market: cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and cannabis, with no analogues. We felt that it would be some analog that nobody had heard of because there were major advances in pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, and the pharmaceutical industry was constantly developing new compounds. We had a feeling that extraordinary things were going to happen, although some would also be very harmful. There would be drugs that would spread rapidly around the world and cause great problems. But what would this drug be, could we foresee what was to come? That was what I was supposed to write my thesis on.

‍

And then you bet it would be fentanyl.

‍I started looking at the synthesis of all drugs. Cocaine is synthesizable, it's difficult, but it can be done. I looked at the synthesis of varieties of caffeine, varieties of amphetamine.... And in the end I concluded in those days, and we are talking about '96, that it would be a pediatric anesthetic, an analgesic called fentanyl, a relatively unknown drug at that time. There was some small outbreak of fentanyl, but they didn't have distribution networks, so they never got anywhere. There was an outbreak in '93 in the Boston area that killed three hundred people and another outbreak in Moscow. I traveled to Russia to talk to people who were consumers and to the MVD, the Russian Ministry of the Interior, equivalent, you might say, to the FBI. So I found myself at MVD headquarters talking to Chief General Serguei about the possibility of this drug having more serious consequences than a few deaths. His view was that addicts would never adopt fentanyl, because it was so rare to see and that it would not be a problem, even if it were available. I differed. All that was needed was a chemist that didn't care about human life or the social harm it might cause. Which substance would be more profitable? Again, I concluded it would be fentanyl. The potency of fentanyl is similar to the potency of LSD, microgram range. In fact, some varieties of fentanyl are more potent than LSD. Ten micrograms of carfentanil is lethal to an elephant. So it's more cost-effective, partly because of its higher potency compared to heroin. And the other problem was the availability of precursors. Although the synthesis was somewhat difficult, simplified versions could be made to obtain an impure substance. Precursors were available and very cheap, a dollar a kilogram in large quantities; fifty-five gallon tanks, several hundred liters or railroad cars full of a substance. All that was needed was an individual wicked enough to do it. You also needed a distribution system like an existing heroin or opiate distribution network. And something indispensable: you needed users who wanted it. Perhaps more than heroin. So what was the likelihood that the average heroin user would take fentanyl instead? To answer this question I spent a good part of my dissertation talking to heroin addicts in the Boston underworld, and even contacted some who took fentanyl during the '93 outbreak, asking them things like, “If you had a lot of heroin and a lot of fentanyl, what would you take?”. They commented on aspects such as how long it takes for the effect to appear and how long it lasts. Do you prefer fentanyl to heroin? I asked the same question many times in different ways to assess the likelihood of “if we had a strong source of fentanyl, would it be easily distributed, would people want it, would it be sold, would it be consumed?” And the conclusion was yes. So, if we had a source of availability, we would have a big problem. I presented my thesis at the Harvard Faculty Club and warned that this could come, that we needed to control the precursors and have monitoring systems, but nobody listened. The academic world responded that my thesis was very interesting but within the genre of science fiction. Back in prison, in 2005, I remember watching the news and learning about the death of a man from fentanyl from a laboratory in Toluca, Mexico. Then we found that China began exporting to the United States a large amount of fentanyl and other legal analogs from its 50,000 small chemical plants. And the epidemic of deaths came.

‍

Analogs and analysis

‍

We are talking about fentanyl contaminating the heroin market, but we also have an adulterated LSD market, finding in its place substances like DOB, DOM or NBOMe. Was there adulterated LSD in your time?

It was not common, although we did have NBOMe, and it was particularly worrying. And we're not talking about opiates here but psychedelics, so it's a good example of the damage that an analog or a variant in a molecule can do. Some variants can be very problematic or even lethal. NBOMe was first synthesized by a chemist at the Free University of Berlin. A postdoctoral researcher was looking for variations of the 2CB synthesized by Sasha Shulgin and obtained this compound with psychedelic effects. One major difference is that 2CB is potent at about 20 mg, but this variation, NBOMe, was potent in the microgram range, closer to the potency range of LSD. Unfortunately, it began to be sold as LSD in blotter paper, particularly in the Indian market. And it turned out that NBOMe was lethal. So there were young people in various places in India taking this NBOMe thinking they were taking LSD and there were some intoxications and deaths. Fortunately, though, whether it was because the chemist suffered a heart attack, acknowledged his mistake, died of an overdose, or was arrested, it was a one-time thing that did not spread. The moral of this story is that today, with this psychedelic current and large corporations involved, tens of thousands of new analogs are going to be developed, many of them using artificial intelligence drug development methods, and we are going to see wonderful compounds, but also others that may not be good for society. NBOMe are a good example.

‍

When would you say this interest in exploring and synthesizing new compounds started in the underground world?

In the 1980s and 1990s we saw very few new substances, the occasional compound, but variations of analogues in the molecule really took off with the creation of the internet, which became more accessible around 1996. Previously, scientific journals and articles containing the syntheses were only on paper and you had to go into libraries to access the information. With the invention of the internet everything was available and accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. This allowed interested people to access the information needed to develop new variations.

‍

In your early years, was there such a thing as internal quality control, did you analyze your product?

Generally because laboratories tend to be mobile for safety reasons, the idea of carrying around a large multi-ton nuclear magnetic resonance device, at least in those days, was quite unlikely. Also, back then it wasn't like today, where you can talk about these things even in academic papers. We're talking about times when quoting the word psychedelic put your career in academia at risk. Still, there were nice people at universities who would sometimes analyze batches with their faculty's instruments. In the underground world, where you had to drive a hundred miles to get anything, analytical methods were fairly simple. You knew what you were doing, you knew the substance you were working with, and you knew the relative purity of the purification procedures. You were simply repeating a process that had already been refined. So you knew you had a pure material and it was easily verified with things like melting points and thin layer chromatography, which can be done in remote environments.

‍

Double life, life in prison and second life

‍

Before we start talking about life in prison, how do you remember your life before prison?

What I can say is that the present is very exciting. I feel extremely fortunate to live in Santa Fe, with family and surrounded by many friends. I value living quietly, in the sense that I don't have a double life to cover up or anything to fear. As of today, I am purely corporate, go to work, get my paycheck and somehow make ends meet. Of course the old life was very exciting and memorable, but this new life for me is delightful, warm, friendly and productive. Living two lives simultaneously can be very difficult and much of mine was spent that way, but no more.

‍

Do you regret that part of your life?

Many people felt we were doing something honorable. In years of darkness and persecution, it felt like a necessary struggle to make LSD available and use it in a thoughtful way. I have no regrets about the old life, but now I feel like a whole being and find this new life very rewarding.

‍

The DEA arrested you in November 2000 and you were sentenced to two life sentences. How long does it take to fit a sentence like that?

If you get a life sentence in the federal system it means you will die in prison. It's a miracle we are having this conversation! It was hard because my kids had just been born when I was arrested and I was only allowed to talk to them on the phone once a week. It's hard to fit in that you're going to live the rest of your life in a tiny cage, and I lived with that feeling for the twenty years I was there.

‍

You entered a maximum security prison with people who had committed violent crimes, in a hierarchical and aggressive environment, with limited access to fresh air, how does a clandestine chemist from the hippie world survive in this environment?

I saw a lot of violence. I lost count of the number of stabbings I witnessed. Men stabbed twenty, thirty times. I remember a young man of thirty-one about to be released in ten days. In the morning I was with him walking and that same night he was stabbed. He died five days later. The stabbing was over a few hundred dollars worth of tobacco. I've seen a lot of men die, quite a few suicides, and I've known murderers and crimes involving children that I can't even talk about. It's extraordinarily difficult. How did I survive? By praying, by the love of my friends, and by hoping to get home to my family somehow, someday. And, against all odds, it happened. For me, in religious terms, my deliverance was just God's grace. A miracle. And you know you have received a second life and the question is, what do I do with this great gift to make the world a little better, how do you spend the remaining years of your second life?

‍

‍

‍

What was your routine to stay sane in this insane context?

I decided not to give up and die. I started studying law all day and then writing motions through the Federal Court. Over twenty years I wrote about a thousand motions, some are thirty pages full of legal analysis and footnotes. I won some of them through the district courts and into the appellate courts, a three-judge panel that oversees several states. I got through the courts of appeals in the Ninth and Tenth Circuits, and won several things that were published, but it wasn't enough to win freedom, except for the last motion. In personal practice, of course, I tried to do a lot of exercise like walking or running, and I did yoga before bedtime. Meditation also helped me a lot. But mostly, apart from legal work, I read, read, read. I always had a book under my arm. I became fond of British and Spanish literature. I'm a big fan of the great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. So when I looked down, I was in 19th century England with carriages and manners or in one of Borges' fabulous fictions. And when I looked up, I saw tattooed thugs stabbing each other.

‍

I know you also looked down to see the ants.

Yes! There was no life at all in the prison. There were thirty-foot walls, seven guard towers with search lights like in the movies, barbed wire and loudspeakers. When we went out into the yard, we were not allowed to stand and talk to each other, we had to keep moving. There was no life, just dirt and cement, so anything living that the men could take care of was precious. If someone found a mouse, they kept it as a pet and built it a cardboard wheel to watch it run. There was a little colony of ants coming out of the ground that attracted quite a few stares, including mine. And so you had men in their fifties, sixties and seventies looking at these ants for hours. We would smuggle food out of the dining hall through metal detectors and multiple guards and pat downs. Taking out a small slice of bread and feeding the ants became important, and we would visit them every day to make sure they were doing well. After all, the men needed something to worry about, it's natural for a person to want to take care of something. It's part of our humanity. For those who still had humanity, which some had already lost.

‍

A six hundred and seventy page story

‍

Another thing you have done in prison is to publish an extensive novel, The Rose of Paracelsus.

At some point I felt I should tell the story of what it was like to be in hiding doing what we did, if we did it, and why we did it, what we hoped to accomplish. I wanted to tell what the lifestyle was like, how we woke up and what we did for breakfast and lunch, what we did during the day, who we interacted with and what our values were. What those lives are like when we talk about global production on a planetary scale of LSD, not just a thousand or ten thousand doses, not even a million doses, but hundreds and hundreds of millions of doses that we managed to ship all over the world. I wanted to write some memories for my children, so that someday they would understand their father. So I started writing, forcing myself to sit down every day for an hour and write a page. I did this for a year and had a ninety thousand word manuscript. I read it and threw it in the wastebasket. By then I had learned enough about writing to realize that it would be better to start over.

‍

You had a lot of time.

Yes, I had all the time in the world, and at that point getting into the writing zone and telling stories was the greatest pleasure, although I also cried when I recalled some memories. I spent five years writing The Rose of Paracelsus and it was all written in pencil because we didn't have typewriters. Also, I was lucky because we assembled a group of four or five people who wanted to learn to write with the support of Richard Shelton, an incredible professor of literature and poetry at the University of Arizona who visited us every week. He was wonderful because he treated us like human beings, like graduate students, and to have someone treat you respectfully when no one else would, even among ourselves, was precious. Every week we would read our little writings as a group. It took me two years to read all of The Rose of Paracelsus in sessions, and Shelton was certainly a great influence.

‍

You seem to have enjoyed the literary experience, do you think you will write another book?

Without a doubt. In fact, before I got out of prison I had eight chapters for the continuation of the story of this group of six clandestine chemists. Their story is so dense that I couldn't fit it into the six hundred and seventy pages of The Rose of Paracelsus. So I would have to sit down and write another twenty chapters; that could take me a couple of years. But writing requires incorporating writing at a certain time of day and every day and there are so many things to do out here.

‍

Will we have a Spanish version?

I would love to have a Spanish translation! If any reader knows of any Spanish publishers who would be interested, I am absolutely open to it.

‍

Good and evil

‍

A judge friend of mine is convinced that human evil exists. After living with the most terrible criminals, is there such a thing?

I think most people are basically good at heart. Most inmates could probably do well with electronic monitoring, unless they are physically violent. It is important that they have a job to keep them busy during the day and also to have an income and not engage in criminal activity. But in terms of good and evil, although I think most people are good, I feel that evil exists. Extermination camps or world wars are proof of this. I remember one early morning I walked into the dining room and there were people from the gangs sitting around. I was smiling deep in thought when I met the gaze of an individual sitting at the table. Just the expression on his face took away the joy and the light, it was like looking into a great darkness. It was the expression of evil.

‍

You also met beings of light like Ross Ulbricht, sentenced like you to two life sentences for the creation of Silk Road, the first crypto market on the deep web.

I'm glad you mention Ross. I met him in prison and we became great friends. We spent our last year together, walking around the prison track, where we had great conversations. I'm not currently allowed to interact with Ross or other prisoners, but I know his mother and will be available to help whenever possible.

‍

In 2020 you finally got parole because of COVID. It seems like everything wasn’t bad about COVID.

Well, the official reason is, “Oh, we’re worried about Mr. Pickard getting COVID and dying in prison.” But he was supposed to die in prison! Plus, there are a lot of men of the same age with similar sentences who will die in prison. So I don’t think COVID is the real reason. I think it might have been my work on fentanyl. In 2019 the Rand Corporation, an influential research group in the United States, published the report The Future of Fentanyl, and my work was highlighted in the third chapter as the earliest predictor of the fentanyl epidemic. There were also numerous references to my suggestions on precursor control. So we attached a copy to the motion for release and asked the court to consider giving a lesser sentence because of that contribution to society. We think that may have been the real reason.

‍

In 1961, Timothy Leary conducted an experiment at Concord Prison, administering psilocybin to inmates to study the reduction in criminal recidivism. Given that you know psychedelics well and also the prison environment, do you think it might be interesting to replicate the experiment?

I think it would be a very wise and valid experiment. In fact, some researchers at Harvard Law School are considering that psychedelic therapy might be helpful for post-traumatic stress syndrome that comes with being incarcerated. I personally don't feel any trauma, but there are people who do, so it might be helpful. The difficulty is getting the Bureau of Prisons or state prisons or any prison system in any government in the world to agree to the use of an exotic drug for treatment within prison or after release. That's a big mountain to climb. I suppose it could be done and should be done, maybe Norway or Germany could try it. Someone will try it, and if the results are positive, it's hard to argue with science.

‍

Magic and strict protocol

‍

It is said, it is told, it is rumored that the LSD you produced was the best. I heard that you followed your own formula and I wonder if this is like grandma's recipe, will you go without sharing it?

I cannot advise on these matters. And although there is a great deal of material on the internet, I would rather encourage interested people to get their degrees and enter the huge psychedelic industry. There are many job opportunities and it is probably better to do so there.

‍

I wonder if it's just a matter of the recipe or is there some quantum physics involved in the sense that the chemist's intention, consciousness, and pure spirit influences the molecular outcome?

It's an interesting question. Obviously, whether you're a clandestine chemist or not, you have to follow a precise process. It's not about doing some kind of incantation and it magically appears. You have to follow a strict protocol or the magic doesn't happen. That said, at least in the clandestine world, the people I know and have interviewed still tend to treat it sacramentally. It means that they purify themselves; they purify the lab, they approach things with delicacy and respect and a sense of deep joy and honor that they can participate in the creation of these compounds.

‍

One of the consequences of the criminal justice system is the impact on a person's life once they are released and they encounter barriers, for example, when it comes to finding a job. You, in that sense, have been lucky.

Certainly, finding a job is extraordinarily difficult for ex-offenders. Fortunately, I didn't have to go through the usual hiring routines because I have a wide network of friends who helped me. I currently advise an investment group in New York City that often invests in psychedelic startups, but also in other neuroscience topics. I also have an academic appointment at Harvard and do small jobs in Santa Fe that provide me with additional income. Somehow, I manage to survive and help my family a little.

‍

I guess it's strange to come out of prison and see this renewed interest in psychedelics from the scientific community and big pharma involved.

It was a fun experience in some ways. I came out of prison after spending twenty years for producing LSD and all of a sudden there were billions of dollars being invested in psychedelics.

‍

What do you think about the medicalization of psychedelics?

I'm very happy to see the medicalization because that's what allows corporations to come in and make investments in research. It's the way for us to really figure out what the mechanism is and what the potential beneficial or unbeneficial aspects of all these compounds are. It's a wonderful time. I'm a big supporter of the medicalization effort, but I also always try to point out that ninety-nine percent of all psychedelic experience is still underground. We're talking about people eating mushrooms walking in the woods, sitting around a campfire by the ocean, or dancing. Not sitting in a doctor's office.

‍

What was your most eye-opening psychedelic experience?

It's a question I can't answer. But I refer you to The Rose of Paracelsus, where I write about an extraordinary event when one of the chemists is accidentally exposed in the lab to ten million doses in a single night. He was literally doused in acid and that is probably the largest human exposure to LSD in history. In the book I describe that night. Fiction or not, I leave you with that thought.

‍

What are your future projects or plans?

I want to continue writing the sequel to The Rose of Paracelsus. My personal future project focuses on a start-up on gene therapy and cognition. And beyond that, my plan is to enjoy friends and help my family grow and finish their education.

‍

An important book for you.

Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges.

‍

‍

This content was originally published in Cáñamo Magazine #318 in Spain and is available online in Spanish.